Posted by Kill Bill on 12/08/06 21:24

Greetings everyone,

I made the jump into Tapeless. Went out and bought a new Sony HD ACVHD
hard drive camcorder. It's for personal use only and is replacing my old
MiniDV camcorder that broke this year. Been searching for a HD camera
for personal use, and I'm pretty shocked at the current state of the
camera industry.

I totally understand that this is cutting edge, and normally I don't
like the bleeding edge, but my personal work flow is simple. I tape
functions, weddings, personal things, kids, work, or whatever suits me..
I fill up the tapes, take them out and throw them into a big draw, put
in the new tape and keep going.. I don't even bother to write anything
on the tape even. A few years latter, I gather the tapes up, figure out
whats on the tape, capture them, put them into FCP, edit, make DVD's
back the edited material up on DVCAM, erase and dump the tapes, and move
on. It's pretty simple.

I'm guessing that a few of you here have been looking into this, and I'm
also guessing that this WILL be the future of cameras. Since ACVHD was
developed by multiple camera companies, we'll probably see lots more of
these coming into the market.

With more cameras, and more support for AVCHD, I'm hoping more tools
will be developed in the near future. And perhaps even editing systems
with work directly with these files.

I have a bunch of notes that I'd like to post, in case anyone else was
looking into buying one of these.

1) First off.. The images are stunning! One could have never dreamed
of these images from such a super small under 14 hundred dollar camera.
It really knocks your socks off.

2) No Firewire. Camera is accessed via USB 2.0 only. Works just like a
digital still camera. Clips are files on a remote HD.

3) Both Mac and PC can access these files, but the book says you
shouldn't use a computer to access the HD files directly.

4) A suite of software with what looks like about 20 programs needs to
be installed on your PC.. PC only! No mac support what so ever.

5) The Sony suite of software is pretty intuitive and pretty easy to
learn. The software lets you transfer the files, convert the files to
MP2, burn a DVD, or burn a AVCHD disc. Nothing exist past that.

6) If you create a regular DVD, it will transcode to a MP2, thus you
basically loose all your HD.

7) You can create a AVCHD disc from a regular DVD, but this format of
DVD will not play in a regular DVD. Nor will it even mount on a Mac! I
think that the AVCHD DVD is set for BlueRay players only. If you put the
DVD that you created into the PC, it launches the suite software AVCHD
and will play it emulating a type of HDDVD player.

8) It makes files called, "20061207123443.m2ts" corresponding to the
esact date. They look like ".m2t streaming". I have been
unsuccessfully opening and playing these files with VLC or Quicktime on
my Mac.

9) I have also been unsuccessful in converting them with ffmpegX to any
other format such as .mov or .mp4.

10) The software also lets you move .mt2s files back onto the camera.

11) The interface of the camera is simple and easy to use.. touch screen.

12) The camera has a Composite, Component, and HDMI out plugs! If no
tools exist for editing these files on the Mac, the HDMI might be my savior.

14) The camera will actual take a 4MP photo with Flash, while filming at
the same time!

15) The clips are playable, and deletable via the on screen menus. No
re-winding of the tapes is very nice here.

16) No time codes that I can see anymore. There's a running time of how
long the clip is.. but I don't see any more drop frame style time codes.

17) No other utilities for converting these files from .mt2s to anything
else yet.. I'm slightly disappointed here because I wish there was more.

18) Several settings exist for video. AVCHD 5M,7M,9M,and 15M. And SD
3M,6M, and 9M. 30Gig will hold 8 hours of video in AVCHD 7M Standard
Quality. I'm happy with this, as I don't have to carry around 7 tapes on
vacation with me.

19) My goal is to just save all the mts2 files for later archiving them
on DVD data disc for later editing once the tools exist on the market.
In reality right now theres not really a HD format to go to anyways.



More to come later..

-Bill

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